


obverse

by forsanethaec



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Ficlet, Gen, Harvard-era, M/M, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-22
Updated: 2012-10-22
Packaged: 2017-11-16 19:22:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/542982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forsanethaec/pseuds/forsanethaec
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>mark, watching eduardo. (a sketch in 2nd person)</p>
            </blockquote>





	obverse

You’re afraid of Eduardo’s hands – how they move, how they are different from yours, how you can’t help but watch them. It unsettles you, his easy presence in your room and wondering if he knows how it unsettles you. And you can’t understand how he can make things look so effortless that for you are so insurmountably difficult: his liquid grace, the lines of him warm and open, as though it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks of him, as though he knows already, maybe, or doesn’t even think of it. You don’t understand how he does that. It’s one of the things – not the only thing – that makes you want to keep him around, that grudging curiosity, the clinical need to catalogue and comprehend.

But it’s not just the way he does it all so much as it’s the way you want to study him, that’s the heart of the matter. And then, and then. How the studying gives way to simple looking, how the looking has no object but a certain off-feeling, a strangeness in you. How he stands just behind you while you sit at your desk and his eyes settle on you, ticking across, crinkling at the corners, and something changes in his face. The unhurried animation of his fingers, pausing, sometimes on the back of your chair. And how your breath goes still in your chest, a visceral reflex, utterly pointless – how it only makes you think his name and calculate the distance between the two of you and search for the warmth of his body, that close, to see if you can feel it, and you know each beat of your heart, on a precipice, and there is nothing to do but let it happen and watch, and watch, as it goes as quickly as it comes. As he moves, as the motions of the world start back up like he didn’t even notice (and if he did, what then?) and it frustrates you to no end and frightens you, too, but that is a more difficult feeling to grasp. 

You think about it all when it’s late and dark and you’re alone, awake, in bed: the way your own body moves, a nervous mechanical bird jumping into flight at every turn. Eduardo and that body don’t belong in the same airspace, don’t make sense that they could coexist, be creations of the same species. It hurts you a little, considering it, without you really understanding why. But that’s the problem with hurts like that. They get inside you and they stick there whether or not you know what makes them happen. 

You think, on the haziest edge of sleep as the sun rises in the Yard, that your body's like a cage that’s shut, and his is one that’s open. You wish you could be inside of it.

**Author's Note:**

> 2nd person and this sort of writing style are two of my favorite things to do and i always want to use them more for tsn so, yep.


End file.
